The Actor as Author of the Text he Acts

We aim to demonstrate how the acting technique and skills of an actor may influence the intentions of a text’s author, showing him new paths through the human and emotional factors. We also aim to demonstrate that what is usually considered a “text” may not always be a fixed entity produced by a single isolated individual. The analysis of the staging and film adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire and the development of the character Stanley Kowalski by Marlon Brando, shows how he changed the written version of the play, shifting its core, interfering with the balance between the two main characters and helping to shape the cultural and historical attributes which rendered its particular place in art history. The text produced by the actor may, thus, assume an identical value to that of the dramatic script from which it developed, or even produce a higher impact.

IMPROVISASI DALAM TEATER ANTARA TEKNIK PEMERANAN DAN PERTUNJUKAN

Improvisation is sometimes hard to be defined. Every theater worker has their own concept, methode and way to do it. But must of all, improvisation is always connected to spontanity which is transformed from acting is doing. When acting is reality of doing there would be a physcal action which brings influence to feelings or emotions. To have a spontaneus physical adaptation in every beat of scene of acting, actors should be well trained in the term of improvisation. The training materials of improvisation contains all elements of acting which are following four rules; why, do’s, don’ts, and how. Actors whom have skill of improvisation could bring it into the reality of acting as a technique in script’s based theater or to perform within improvisation’s theater. Keywords; improvisation, acting technique, performance, training

Origins of a Menschendarstellerin: Characterization and Operatic Performance in Fin-de-siècle Vienna

In fin-de-siècle Vienna frustrations with ‘lifelessness’ began to boil over. Unlike previous generations of opera-goers, however, the Viennese did not so much fear singers becoming automata as desire dramatic performance that foregrounded humanness and subjectivity. Critics increasingly fetishized vitality – manifested in characters with dramatic integrity and singers capable of nestling themselves in their roles – and by 1910 wanted singers to communicate their own interiority and ‘wilfulness’ as well. This article uses the reception of the soprano Marie Gutheil-Schoder (1874–1935) to demonstrate the growing currency of these imperatives. A controversial hire for the Hofoper, she was initially disparaged by critics as vocally ‘weak’, but the Viennese gradually ‘learnt to love this voice’ for the way in which it could be pressed into the service of the drama and her will. I explain her changing fortunes, arguing that opera-goers valued certain voices in accordance with evolving conceptions of characterization, acting technique and human subjectivity.

Method-ising Cognitive Truth: The Paradigm of Subtext in Baz Luhrmann’s Silver-Screen Vision of Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding

A case study of the wedding scene in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet directed by Baz Luhrmann 1996, this article is a hermeneutic exploration of the truth pursuits within the subtext from the empirical perspective of a practicing director and a semiotician, in accordance with the principles of the Method acting technique. The author proposes a new, space-negotiated definition of subtext as a separate cognitive unit, based on the multilayered interdependences within the directorial semiotic triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène. In a minute shot-by-shot analysis, the author examines the hermeneutic collocations in-between the elements of the triad, and demonstrates the ways cognitive spaces become subtextual statements within each shot, as well as how the internal subtexts shape the metasubtext of each shot in order to arrive at the megasubtext of the scene — and subsequently the total subtext of the entire story in a cultural text. Aspects of the evolution of the subtext representations are analyzed within the triad of word–emotional action–mise-en-scène, against the backdrop of the epistemological pursuits of the truth. How do we reach the truth in a cultural text? What components of the film language rule the expression of the truth in a cultural text?

Opera and “Director’s” Theatre of the 21st Century

The article raises the issues of interaction between modern direction and the musical text of opera. Researches of foreign and domestic scientists in the fi eld of theatre studies and musicology allow analyzing a musical performance as an independent text, in which there is an interchange between different types of art. The author focuses on the opera as a dialogue between music and theater. The author proposes three main forms of the dialogue for consideration: the director and the composer, the director and the viewer, the director and the actor. The article expresses the opinion that, in the process of interaction between the director and the opera text, some myths appeared and started to impede the development of this process and to cause confl ict situations while analyzing the fi nal results. Among those kinds of myths, the author reckons the idea of director-conceptualist as the destroyer of the composer’s idea, the unconditional defi nition of this idea, and the so-called “reverse logic” of feeling and action in musical theater. Observing the functioning of each of these myths on concrete examples, the author comes to conclusion on the necessity to “debunk” them for further successful development of musical theater. From this position, the article analyzes fragments from operas by Russian and foreign composers and their stage impersonations. In the dialogue “director—viewer”, two main ways of the participants’ interaction are defi ned: the theater as a form of escapism and the theater as a “catalyst” of intelligence. The author emphasizes the need to have both the ways, so that the viewer should be able to choose. The author considers the relations between the director and the actor to be the most positive for the modern theatre, which led to the emergence of a new type of performer on the modern opera stage: singerartist, who fully owns the acting technique of “internal action”. The article concludes that there is an ambiguous, but rather perspective and positive situation in the modern musical theater, which determines further ways of the genre’s development.

The Structure of Plasticity: Resistance and Accommodation in Russian New Drama

The history of the Russian stage traces the importance of objects in storytelling back to an earlier art: plastika, a stylized acting technique that “speaks” spatially with objects. In Russian New Drama, objects enter the stage as supplements to the hero, who survives the disintegration of the Soviet Union as a shell-of-the-self. As extensions of the hero, the hitherto lifeless things begin “to act” and tell their own story.